Anxious about trying for a baby? Here's how to deal

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Andee Tagle (0:16)

When you're trying to get pregnant, there is just so much waiting involved.

It's just room for your thoughts, and there's so much of that when you're trying to conceive, right? There's waiting for the day that you're ovulating, there's waiting for your period, there's waiting just that few minutes for that pregnancy test. All of that anticipation can really understandably be inherently anxiety-inducing, nerve-wracking. For some people, they're feeling this anxiety even before they're trying to have a baby. It's people who are seeing people around them struggling and they hear people struggling. So they're not even on the train yet, but they think it's going to be them.

Marielle Segarra (0:53)

I call that borrowing trouble from the future.

Andee Tagle (0:55)

Yeah. Someone told me once that worrying is like a rocking chair. It's something to do, but it's not going to get you anywhere.

Marielle Segarra (1:01)

Yeah. Now I'm trying to picture somebody trying to actually get somewhere in a rocking chair. Rocking their way down the street, inch by inch.

Hey, it's Marielle Segarra. You're listening to Life Kit. And I talked to Life Kit reporter, Andee Tagle, about the anxiety that can come up when you're trying to have a baby. It's especially difficult for folks who are having trouble conceiving when they get invited to say a friend's baby shower or when their sibling gets pregnant. And it's like, you're happy for them, but you're also just really sad that it isn't happening for you. And I bet social media amplifies that.

Andee Tagle (1:49)

Definitely. I mean, I think the contrast can really turn up the volume. And social media is really, really good at that. But I think there's also another side of that coin, and it's that social media can spread awareness, it can spread visibility.

The sources that I spoke to said that as hard and lonely as this process can be, can you imagine how much more siloed you might feel if you were dealing with this infertility even a few decades ago? So I talked to reproductive endocrinologist Lucky Seacon about this.

Lucky Seacon (2:17)

There are these legions of women online, and they all know each other's story. Their profiles will have like how long they've been trying, how many miscarriages they've had. Like there's this whole subculture online of fertility warriors. And if one of them makes it through to the other end and gets pregnant and you're left behind, I think that's really hard mentally.

Andee Tagle (2:42)

So on the one side, you don't have to deal with the anxiety of it alone, which is nice, but it can also give you a lot more things to be anxious about. Maybe you see your friend going through one thing or another and you're like, oh, I haven't thought to do that, that wasn't on my to-do list. Now I'm worried about that. And it can make it a lot easier to compare your life to someone else's like you were talking about.

Lucky Seacon (3:00)

We're social beings. You need community.

But if the community is going through the same thing that you are, it can get messy. And there's a lot of comparison and I think negative self-talk and people feeling like, oh, so-and-so looks like they're handling it better than I. And I think that's really the key is like, take the community and the connection. But it's really a game of mental fortitude and discipline to say, I'm in my own lane. I'm on my own journey.

Marielle Segarra (3:33)

On this episode of Life Kit, Andee walks us through the realities of conception anxiety and what we can do when we're feeling it.

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